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Howie Richmond, Music Publisher, Dies at 94

A hit song is not born but made. No matter how clever the lyrics, no matter how catchy the tune, no song climbs the charts on its own. To become a hit — or to have even a chance of becoming one — a fledgling pop song needs a behind-the-scenes campaign as tireless and well choreographed as any military offensive.

That is where music publishers like Howie Richmond came in. Mr. Richmond, who died on May 20 at 94 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., was among the last of a Runyonesque breed that was long a vital if largely unheralded segment of the music business.

The name to the contrary, a music publisher does not issue sheet music. (The title is a holdover from the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the job entailed precisely that.) In representing the commercial interests of song, lyricist and composer, publishers of Mr. Richmond’s vintage were equal parts tout and talent scout, matchmaker and midwife, broker and bill collector.

For these publishers spotting a promising song, persuading the finest available singers to record it, showering disc jockeys with the results, placing the song on film and television soundtracks, and collecting royalties for its creators was, for a share of the proceeds (typically 50 percent then), all in a day’s work.

If the publisher was very good, and a little lucky, a hit ensued. That often happened for Mr. Richmond, widely considered one of the most significant music publishers of his era. Over the years his stable included artists as diverse as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie; Bill Evans and Kurt Weill; the Who, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd; and Shel Silverstein, whose talking blues song “A Boy Named Sue” became, under Mr. Richmond’s stewardship, a hit for Johnny Cash in 1969.

There are still music publishers, of course, including Mr. Richmond’s own business, the Richmond Organization, an independent concern based in New York and London. But the profession is an increasingly conglomeratized affair, and today, in the age of new media, it is occupied intensely with the intellectual-property side of things.

All this has largely rendered Mr. Richmond’s signature brand of shmoozing — “relating,” he called it — a vanishing art, as obscure a cultural artifact as the shoe leather, airmail stamps and telephone booths that were for decades the lifeblood of his enterprise.

Howard Spencer Richmond was born in Queens on Jan. 18, 1918. His father, Maurice, was a music publisher whose catalog included the 1890s anthem “The Sidewalks of New York,” which furnished the family with a handsome annuity until it entered the public domain.

In the mid-1930s, after studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Howie Richmond worked in New York as a press agent, with clients including Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters.

In 1949, following wartime service in the Army Air Forces, he started his first music-publishing business, a one-room operation on West 57th Street. Mr. Richmond was joined by two associates, Al Brackman and Abe Olman.

Photo

Howie RichmondCredit
Courtesy of The Richmond Organization

They specialized in novelty songs at first. “Ballads take a long time to develop, and that’s expensive,” Mr. Richmond told Billboard magazine in 1999. “You can get novelty songs started quickly.”

Mr. Richmond was one of the first publishers to send records directly to disc jockeys, a task previously the province of record companies. For him, “relating” included airmailing every new pressing to 300 influential D.J.’s.

The strategy paid off. In his first year Mr. Richmond had six hits — something, Collier’s magazine reported in 1951, that might have taken a rival a decade to achieve.

Among them were the novelty songs “Music! Music! Music!,” recorded by Teresa Brewer, which reached No. 1, and “The Thing,” recorded by Phil Harris, a staggeringly silly number about a box with something unnamed but very odd inside.

Mr. Richmond scored one of his biggest successes in 1950, when he had the Weavers — Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert — record Lead Belly’s poignant waltz “Goodnight, Irene” in a lush arrangement by Gordon Jenkins.

“Some people in the trade believe that no other song ever sold so fast in so short a time,” The New York Times reported that year, citing estimates that “Goodnight, Irene,” which became a No. 1 hit, was played two million times a day on radio, television and jukeboxes.

“There are 1,440 minutes in a day,” The Times continued, “which means that ‘Goodnight, Irene’ can be heard around 1,400 times a minute.”

As the ’50s unfolded, Mr. Richmond became known for his continued representation of Mr. Seeger and other artists who were blacklisted amid the anti-Communist fervor of the period.

After an early marriage that was dissolved, Mr. Richmond wed Anita Bertinazzo in 1952; she died in 1996.

Mr. Richmond’s death was confirmed by his family. He is survived by their children, Frank, Larry (the Richmond Organization’s current president and chief executive), Phill, Robert and Elizabeth Richmond-Schulman; a sister, Shirley Gartlir; and 13 grandchildren.

Mr. Richmond’s hit-making prowess, noteworthy by any standard, was all the more remarkable in that he was laboring under a singular disadvantage. By his own cheerful admission, he was utterly tone-deaf.

A version of this article appears in print on May 29, 2012, on page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Howie Richmond, 94, Music Publisher. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe